ALL QUIET ON THE HOME FRONT: COLIN PANTALL

I’m pretty sure that my definition of (contemporary) photography as art (the serious expression of intelligence) is a bit (a lot) more stringent (limited) that most people’s.

For the longest time I had trouble explaining my complaint. Mostly I fell back on the idea that many of the photographs being put on the art pedestal these days look, to me, more like illustration. You know . . . executing a plan to arrive at a foregone conclusion. Sure, some of them are swell to look at, there might even be some concept and/or happenstance behind them, but not much has really been discovered or disclosed, little risk is involved, nothing seems to be at stake.

Random noise

Then I ran across an interview with Chris Boot, the executive director of Aperture. While I didn’t agree with everything he said, there was one thing which stood out for me. Let me paraphrase . . .

He said that the common language of photography used to be one of detachment. While the resulting photographs may have had some kind of personal reverberations for the photographer and certain viewers, the photographers’ position was on the outside, looking. (It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway . . . there are exceptions to this.)

He goes on to say that Nan Goldin changed all that. (I’m pretty sure that nothing is ever the result of just one other thing.) Anyway, he says that she combined the personal and the political and the observational, that she made herself, and the medium itself, her subject, and that that pointed to a more modern way of using a camera.

This is not to say that one must only photograph their own circle of friends and acquaintances to be an artist. That’s too literal a reading of what he’s getting at. He’s talking about what you have invested in your work, beyond the time and the money, some looking, a bit of craft and the quest for acceptance/popularity/sales. In business parlance, do you have skin in the game? (When you do really have skin in the game it ceases to be a game.)

I bring all this up because it’s something I think about. But also because I just received All Quiet on the Home Front, by Colin Pantall, a classic example of the potential of contemporary photography . . .

All Quiet on the Home Front is a book about a father and a daughter growing up, it’s about love and landscape, about wonder and wondering and wandering, about the passage of time. It’s tender but not maudlin; measured but emotional; honest and, you can just feel it, true; it’s simple and complex at the same time.

We see Isabel, Colin’s daughter, grow up, we see their house and the land Colin and Isabel walk to and through. We see what she does on that journey, almost always lost in herself. We catch glimpses of Colin’s wife, Katherine. We don’t see Colin, but his presence is felt in every frame. And we can read this thoughts.

The images are not sequenced chronologically. Here time, like memory, jumps back and forth. It’s a long arc, but throughout there are wonderful page spreads that show us moments of time barely separated.

All Quiet on the Home Front touches on something timeless: family, father, daughter, time, the land. It’s quiet but contains layers of resonance where the personal, the political and the observational combine. Colin has made himself and the medium his subject.